Ideas - What it means to call your loved one a ‘corpse’

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

In the hour’s following her mother’s death, Martha Baillie undertook two rituals — preparing a death mask of her mother’s face, and washing her mother’s body. That intimacy shaped her grief. She had learned earlier to witness death and be present, living with regret after she left the room to get a nurse when her father died. For Baillie her mother's body was not a corpse that has no life. To her, it would "always be something alive." The novelist and writer explains what signified the difference in her book, There Is No Blue, the 2024 winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered, available now.

This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. If you live long enough, you will lose people you love, and you will grieve. Grief always seems to be waiting for us, even when we don't see it coming. And we're not always ready for it, even when we do see it coming, leaving us shattered and unmoored, and feeling nakedly alone. But that grief itself can connect us to others who have known grief.

If I understand grief right, it alerts us to being among the grieving. Not always. Of course, sometimes we've probably all had the experience of grief isolating us profoundly. But there's this sort of power of grief is that it joins us to the grieving. Grief feels so powerful because it alerts us to how many of us are grieving. We are not alone in the grief.

American poet and essayist Ross Gay on ideas in 2024. Calgary-based writer Amy Lynn was blindsided and devastated by the sudden death of her 31-year-old husband, Curtis, several years ago. It revealed to her the awful depths of grief and that it wasn't hers to bear alone. And we are really, I believe, at our best when we see each other

and when we take time to connect with each other and when we are patient with each other's inevitable burdens of love. And that's what grief really is. It is the final, sometimes awful burden of love. Amy Lynn writes about her journey through loss and grief in her memoir Hereafter. It was a finalist for the 2024 Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Nonfiction. We'll hear more from Amy Lynn and two of the other finalists for the prize throughout tonight's program. Martha Bailey won the prize for nonfiction for her book, There Is No Blue, essays about

three very different people and three very different experiences of grief. The death of her 99-year-old mother. My autonomy is being hollowed out by the suction of her death, the sweeping tug of a train entering a station, attempting to draw everyone from the platform. The death of her father, twenty-five years earlier. I was pregnant, preoccupied. Then suddenly my father was gone.

He'd vanished into a hole in the ground. The hole was lined with unrequested bright plastic grass rolled out and down to prevent our eyes from seeing soil embrace the shiny box that held him. And not long after her mother, the death by suicide of her older sister, Christina. Martha Bailey is a novelist and non-fiction writer in Toronto. Her book opens with her mother's final days and two rituals Martha undertook in the hours following her mother's death, preparing a death mask of her mother's face and washing her mother's body.

Neither of those rituals were planned in advance. What I did know in advance was that if I had a chance when someone close to me died to be really present for every second of that unfolding, that was what I wanted. When I was 33, my father had died of cancer. And in that situation, I was also the only person who was in the room. I was very pregnant, so not sleeping well. So I woke up early in the morning and I thought, I'm in the wrong place. And I nudged my husband and said, I'm going to the hospital. And my mother who had been spending several nights in a row with my father in his hospital room had been advised to go home and get some rest.

So I suddenly noticed this change in my father's breathing not long after I arrived and I immediately panicked and ran and got a nurse. We knew that we were there to watch this man leave, but when you see someone struggling, I'm going to save this person. And of course, the moment the nurse came in, then the institution stepped in, and that last intimate moment between me and my father was gone. And so I felt deeply that if I hadn't run out of the room and got that nurse and I had just said, all right, he's dying, that's what you're here to witness, stay with this, be

with this, I would have had a very rich experience that I missed. So it sort of stayed in my mind. So I think what was prepared was I'm going to be here through the whole of this. But how do you stay with a body when you're by yourself in the room with someone who's deceased if you have no rituals to support that. And a lovely Romanian nurse who worked in the seniors' home where my mother was living said, you know, your mother is going to die within the next 48 hours. You have to have somebody, some funeral home, prepared to come and take away her body.

But you can decide when to make that phone call. So you don't have to do it right away, which was an enormous liberty. And I felt the moment had definitely not yet arrived. And I remembered that a friend of mine who was an artist had made a death mask of a friend of hers. So I called her up and she happened to be home, said, I will see if I have the right materials, cycled over. And while she was cycling over, the caregivers came in to say they were going to wash my

mother's body. And I was able to say to them, actually, I would like to wash her body. And that was, for me, an extraordinary experience. I don't know that everyone would want to do that, but it was an extension of intimacy of a sort I couldn't have planned. I think it shaped the grief that I felt later. I mean, obviously the grief was also grief for someone who was three weeks shy of her hundredth birthday, who'd lived a long and full life.

I knew that the end was coming. I was fully prepared for it. But still, you're losing your mother. And so to have that final intimacy was very important. When your mom passed, you reflect in the book on the word corpse. What does it mean to name the body of a loved one a corpse? It means that you're willing to make the phone call that says, now this body is going to be removed from a bed and placed, I assume, in some form of refrigeration until whatever

happens to it happens next. And that sterile place is not a place you want to put somebody's body. It is somewhere appropriate to put a corpse. And it wasn't really until I walked over to touch her hand. I wanted to touch her hands again because that had been, her hands had been her last means of expression. After she ceased to be able to speak, she would still move her hands and readjust them.

So I went over to just touch her hand and I could see that her fingers were starting to look a little blue. And then you notice that there's sweat, the body is colder, certain physiological changes are occurring. And at that point, I can attach the word corpse. But it's interesting because I think in the book, I say I attach the word corpse. But it's interesting because I think in the book I say I attach the word corpse and then I return to saying body. I still would not want to speak about my mother's corpse.

Can you explain that? What's the importance of going back to the use the word body? Because the word corpse to me, A, it suggests simply by association, decay. I think of a corpse as something that no longer has any life in it. And my mother's body for me will always be something alive. Plume of black smoke rose out of the chimney. Briefly, my mother marked the blue sky. By the time I'd come around the front of the

chapel and stood on the path running the length of its north side, my mother had become transparent vapor. Equally, I was curious about what it was like to be there when, again, your mother's body transformed into something entirely different from a solid state with weight to something that was vapor and ash. You mean in the cremation. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it's a way of coping with it, but I became fascinated by the whole process. What would it be like to be someone whose job is rolling coffins or boxes

into an oven that's going to cremate them? I was very interested in who this man was who was actually performing that task because that can't be an easy task to perform. And when I arrived at the cemetery where they were going to cremate my mother's body, I'd had a sensation all day of the city being brand new, unlike the city I'm accustomed to, which is very familiar. I saw it differently. And I think maybe there's a liberation in that transformation from something solid material into vapor crossing the path and I realized that, oh, the light is undulating here, that must be vapor. That's in fact part of my mother

crossing this path and altering how the light is reaching my eye, which would have delighted her because she was a painter and therefore obsessed with light and its effects. And there, I think that ties in with that sensation of newness. I mean, within a death, along with the loss, there is a liberation, a liberation of the person who's left and a liberation in the sense that you're entering a new phase of your life. You have always had a mother and now you are motherless. We locate ourselves in our bodies, on the land, in the rooms we inhabit, and in the languages we speak.

Body, land, room, and language provide the psyche with a home. A theme that kind of comes up in the book often is the importance that your mother and your sister place on location. Locating themselves, so both physically and psychologically. There's an emphasis on kind of, you know, room in a house

or the porch or all these different spaces. In the essay about my mother, her body, I think it came because my mother would often leave a message on our answering machine. She would say, I'm just calling to say that I'm here. You know, that I love you and I'm here. And this emphasis that she was here, I felt was her way of addressing her own mortality.

She was 99. So she was very much living in the moment when you would say, how are you? She would say, I'm here. So that sense of location started to interest me. And what did that mean for her when you're losing your memories? When you think you're pretty sure you had a brother and sister, but you can't really provide details, and yet you can still nail the crossword puzzle. So in certain ways, your mind is very precise and in other ways things are falling away

and so much of who we are is constructed from memory. So as those memories start to fall away, what do you mean when you say I am here? It takes on a different quality. ["The Last Supper"] My name is Jenny Ye-Jean Wills and I'm the author of a book of personal essays entitled Everything and Nothing at All. I write a lot about physical wellness as well as mental wellness and some of the consequences of not necessarily being 100% in either of

those areas. When I'm writing about disordered eating, suicidal ideation, chronic depression or any of those mental illnesses, I'm thinking about what it means to be overly corporeal, too much in your body, but also its opposite, completely detached and disconnected. The final essay in the collection is entitled Love Language. It is about physical deterioration, but also the slow, painful act of disordered eating and how it's connected to a compulsion to disappear. What does it mean to have a love language that is to feed others, where one cannot consume even a bite of love themselves? themselves, what can be made of the body that one desires so much to simply disappear. When my sister, she would tell me often that as a schizophrenic, one of the greatest challenges was

to believe that she existed, that locating yourself, believing that you actually existed was a huge challenge. And she had come to the conclusion that she really existed only in language. And at one point, I had a little note she'd pinned to her fridge that said, language believes in the patient's existence. And she said for her, that was literal. When she would read those words, she believed that those words were telling her she existed. So I became very interested in location in terms of her. If you've rejected your body or if you no longer feel that your body is a machine that

some other forces are controlling, it's no longer a welcoming home. Where do you exist? And then how do the rooms of a house become your vessel or your container? And especially when one of your reasons for killing yourself to say, because of losing the house, is that also because of losing your body. We would never again stand in each other's presence and speak. Never again. Death's finality is like a blow to the head, or like a cartoon. Being punched by the death of a person you love would make you see stars.

I'm wondering whether those deaths of your sister and your mother coming so close together, is there a sense in which their deaths made you feel the opposite, dislocated? Certainly my sister's death, that was a much more brutal death and a much harder one to accept for me. And I think for perhaps a year following her death, I was so consumed by guilt.

My only desire was to turn the clock back, alter my own behavior, change the outcome. And I knew that was completely futile. And in a sense, I think when you say dislocated, I feel as though I was literally consumed by that desire so that I no longer felt fully present. It's sort of as though a wall of glass is surrounding you and the things that normally you could reach out and touch are no longer accessible, which is a form of absence. You're not fully present anymore because I'm so consumed by this desire to turn the clock backwards and the rational part of me knows that this is impossible. My now sole purpose in life is futile.

And then you have to figure out how to escape that narrative. Do you also resort to language in the same way that your sister did to, as you say, prove your existence? That's interesting. I'd never thought of it that way. I certainly resort to language to give things a shape. I often think of writing as akin to sculpting. It's a way of being able to walk around something,

an event, and see it from many different angles, and realize that no one of those perspectives is the correct perspective. You could simply all be present. and realize that no one of those perspectives is the correct perspective. You could simply all be present. Language enables me to go on that walk around an event. [♪ Music playing. My name is Amy Lin, and I'm the author of the memoir Hereafter. Language, particularly when it comes to events that break time, My name is Amy Lin, and I'm the author of the memoir Hereafter.

Language particularly when it comes to events that break time in the way that grief does. Language which is rooted in time, in causality. X will inform Y will inform Z. Our temporal language absolutely collapses in the face of an event like grief that removes people from the temporal reality in which they have been living. There is such a breakdown in time, and when time crumbles so language crumbles. And there is a real struggle there to create a language ex nihilo for the kinds of pain and the kinds of love that are left behind when a beloved goes beyond our reach. But I know that when we grieve, all of us reach for what we have, and that for some people,

writers like me in particular, language is what we have, and however insufficient, is what we have, and however insufficient and however trapped in a time that may or may not exist for the griever, we come to language to express even a small part of the experience. And it is so powerful when we reach for even the inadequate, the ways in which it can reveal an entire universe. Can you talk about how you grappled with finding language to express something that in some ways is inexpressible? Can language actually access something that's so deeply felt and universal? I think in my writing, or I hope, the silences are as important as the words.

So for me, sort of like a synaptic gap, you have to leave these spaces. And I think in images and then translating those images into words. And that's, I think, where the inexpressible, you know, a metaphor is something that you can't, it's in motion. I think it's in an essay by Anne Carson, she takes a short story by Kafka where he, a child

has a spinning top and an adult of some sort, I think he was a scientist, I can't remember, keeps wanting to figure out how this spinning top functions and stops its motion. And then of course, it's a dead spinning top. And she said metaphor functions in the same way. So this is the inexpressible that the image can capture. So that's that part. And then the universal, I think, I think that the details, oddly enough, the details of the very personal, the very particular, if they're really true, that's the route to the universal, not through generalization. Very specific. About a year ago, American poet and essayist Ross Gay spoke to us on

ideas and he talked about grief binding us to the grieving and kind of cracking us open and making us aware of two things. One, how many people are out there grieving and kind of cracking us open and making us aware of two things. One, how many people are out there grieving and our dependence on other people. Yeah, absolutely. I think when you're really smitten by a loss, you definitely realize you can't come through this alone. The people who surrounded me, who gave me so much love and support, that's critical. When it hasn't shut you down in that condition that I was describing with the glass separating

you, it makes you more porous and it makes you realize the degree to which we're all interdependent. As much as there are days where I wrestle with grief and where I resent the lessons that I have learned through carrying it, I am really grateful for the ways in which grief humbled me and brought me to a place that Curtis intuitively understood, which is that people are so finite, so small in the scale of the universe. And we are really, I believe, at our best when we see each other and when we take time to connect with each other and when we are patient with each other's inevitable burdens of love. And that's what grief really is.

It is the final, sometimes awful burden of love. Can you talk about that word porous? How does it make you more porous? Well when you said cracks you open, it dislocates you, it disorients you. All the small methods we have of distracting ourselves from our own mortality on a daily basis, all the demands that are placed on us that we attempt to answer these demands, be it work, be it family, suddenly you don't have that capacity. You don't have the concentration, you don't have the focus. And so those habits or simply methods of working can loosen. You're just less contained, you're less driven.

Maybe your armor has been removed and therefore you're more porous. I'm asking because my sense is that grief is defined in its most basic form by being a very solitary experience. So actually, maybe both can exist at the same time. You become more porous, but are you also very alone? I think you're very alone in that there's nobody else who can feel exactly what you're feeling and the world is carrying on as though nothing, you know, why is everyone else not aware that this devastation is happening? But on another level, you can't get through that without the support of others. And

so you reach out, you want to find other people, how have they survived this experience? And in that sense, it's very much about connection. And I also think that when you're grieving, it is about life. You're living in a sense, the fallout of someone's death. It's an act of living, even if it's a painful one. And so I never like to think of it as attempting to achieve closure or something that put an end to that process. It's more like when you see these trees

that have these huge knots in them, I sort of think of each one of those is a loss. I'm sort of now a tree that has these great lumps on it. And those are what a sculpture would cut off and then carve into a bowl. So in a sense, you become maybe, I don't know, a better vessel. You're maybe more receptive to receiving more from others when you experience a profound loss. That's so beautiful. I love trees. But yeah, I think we just become gnarly.

We don't necessarily become more beautiful. Martha Bailey is the author of There Is No Blue, the 2024 winner of the Hillary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, in Australia, on ABC Radio National,

and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayaad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA,

the news you got to know and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. A warning that the next part of this episode deals with suicide and suicidal thoughts. Please note that there are resources that can help if you or anyone you know needs them. You can call or text 988 for the National Suicide Helpline or search online for local resources.

In August 2019, Martha Bailey hadn't heard from her sister, Christina, for some time. Full of dread, Martha went to check on her. She found writing on the bedroom wall. In Blue Marker in Calm Cursive, she gave three reasons to die. Her final poem, Three Rungs of words on the vertical white surface. Because of schizophrenia, because of the juniper tree, because of losing the house, and a dozen inches lower, off to the right, in block letters. You can say goodbye. Christina had died by suicide at the age of 61.

Martha's relationship with her sister was intense, fraught, never easy as Christina struggled with mental illness, but it was also full of love and care and admiration for her resolve to live as best she could and her boundless creative talent. And as difficult as the relationship could be, Martha always reckoned with Christina's fierce intelligence. She was rather intimidating

because she was very perceptive and she was always, I think, trying to read me very closely. She was looking for information. She would say that her way of navigating the world of being human, and she always put human with a capital H, and did not define herself as human. So she said, to navigate the world of humans, I imitate you. So I always felt quite scrutinized. She was a great authority in my head. I always thought much smarter than me,

so I would tend to take whatever she said very seriously. She could have a lovely sense of humor. Even in her most dire situations, she had this incredible sense of humor. After she'd passed away, I found this huge white binder with the title Dear Martha. And in that, one of the texts that she was presenting me was all written in three-word sentences. So all the sentences had only three words, and it was about how to avoid a moment of

suicidality. And she said that she had taken an old stocking of my mother's and stuffed it with cloth and then tied this thing to her body. And when it bounced up and down, it would help her to return to her body. And when I mentioned this to someone in the medical profession who works with people living with schizophrenia, they said, yes, yes, that made total clinical sense. But what she had attached to this where she said, yes, yes, that made total clinical sense. But what she had attached to this, where she said, I gave it a birth certificate.

So she gave it a name and I gave it a birth certificate, all new materials. She's in the middle of trying to keep herself from killing herself and she still has a sense of humor. Wow. Could you talk about her schizophrenia? How did that affect her way of being? Well, certainly it was very isolating. She said she trusted nobody. When I would get a sense that she wasn't trusting me, she would say, but don't take this personally. I don't trust anybody. She

was also had an enormous degree of self-awareness. So she could hide a great deal that she was going through. And you could sit and have a great conversation about literature or art and not necessarily know everything else that was going on. And there was a book that she'd really enjoyed and asked me if I liked it. And so I borrowed it from the library, had a look, and I said, doesn't, really doesn't speak to me. And I even knew to, you know, frame that very carefully.

This isn't a reflection on the book. It's probably lacking on my part, but I don't connect with this. That to her was devastating. You know, I found afterwards in journals, Communication is a failure, no hope of communication. My sister hates this book. I feel numb in my entire being. What was it like for you to read that after the fact? It was heartbreaking in the sense that it drove home to me how painful her life must have been because if you could be wounded that deeply from something so small, that to me suggests a very painful existence. And at the same time was sort of confirming because I felt, okay, this sense that I was

constantly walking on eggshells, that any move I made might have enormous repercussions and unpredictable ones was not just my imagination. Before she died by suicide, she wrote this on the wall next to her, that she was going to kill herself because of schizophrenia, because of the juniper tree, and because of losing the house. And beneath that in capital letters, she wrote, you can say goodbye. I just wonder what meaning you walked away with. You can say goodbye in one way.

I would like to read it as a state of permission to herself where she's saying, because of schizophrenia, because of the juniper tree, because of losing the house. You Christina can say goodbye to the world. You're free to go. There was no anger in the way she wrote. Does that suggest it was a message to herself? So possibly a message to herself

that was a calming message, a taking on of agency, of power, you were allowed to make this decision. On the other hand, it could also be quite clearly a message to me, especially since because of the final one, because of losing the house, because that was in part because of decisions I made. And she knew that I was the only person with the keys to that house. I would clearly be the one who would find her. So because of, because of, because of you, maybe with a finger in the air, can say goodbye, this is what I have to say to you.

Yeah, but there's no way to know. There's no way of knowing. How do you grapple with that, not knowing 100% what she meant by those lines? I think in a way the whole book is a book about how do we live with never knowing things for certain. Because the first one, because of schizophrenia, is quite clear. This is a difficult thing to live with and I've had enough.

I'm exhausted. And the second one, because of the juniper tree, is a reference to a very brutal tale by the Brothers Grimm. An evil stepmother, a young boy comes home, he wants an apple. The stepmother opens a large box full of apples and a wooden crate and says, reach in, choose one. And she uses the lid of the crate to behead the boy. Later she ends up blaming the boy's sister for his death. It's extremely

manipulative. So she knew that I had read that tale by the Brothers Grimm. And so I think because of the Juniper Tree was her referring to her conviction that she had been at some point in her life abused by our father. And that's where you enter the territory of, I will never know. I have her conviction, no memories behind it, no specific act, just a conviction. And trauma can erase memories. That absence of memory, that absence of a specific act doesn't, to my mind, make her claim illegitimate. On the other hand, here's an accusation towards someone with whom I had a very different relationship. And I won't ever know where the truth lands in that. Though I'm unable to corroborate Christina's grimace narrations,

her accusations tie me to an ongoing search for strands of truth woven into the tales that tormented her. Tales in whose laboratories she was subjected to ever more sadistic acts performed by an increasingly elaborate network of enemies whenever her illness intensified. Schizophrenia, over time, tailored Christina's past, measuring, cutting, pinning, stitching, a skin-tight suit of horror from the fabric of her childhood. She seemed very certain that your father had abused her. Could it be that that certainty

stems purely from her way of processing other traumatic events in her life? It's a possibility. Yeah. What I didn't want to do in this book was, you know, I didn't want it to become an examination of false memory syndrome. I didn't want to attempt to arrive at any conclusion one way or the other. That for me is a difficult ethical decision because it means that I've made public an accusation towards a man who may or may not be guilty. And if he's innocent, then he now has this accusation attached to him and anyone who thinks of him will always think of this accusation. On the other hand, perhaps my sister was right And it's irresolvable. There's a quotation in the book from Georges Perrec, a French writer, who wrote a fascinating

book called W. And he goes back and he looks at his own memories. And he was Jewish. His father had died at the very beginning of the war. And then his mother handed him over to the Red Cross to be taken to Free France to the somewhere a little more safe. And as a child staying in a boarding school, he's out skating on a pond. And one day someone comes down on a toboggan very fast and knocks him over. And I think it's his, I can't remember, it's his collarbone or something is broken that can't be put in a cast so they secure his arm behind his back. And he then loves this. Suddenly all this attention is lavished on him because he's been the victim of this accident.

And years later he goes back to that same village and he meets a stonemason who had been in the same year at school and the other man says, oh were you present the day that that boy was skating and this person came down on their toboggan and his arm was broken and Perak says he suddenly realized it wasn't in fact him and he had just envied this boy. And for me that was here's this child who's lost both his parents. He has this enormous wound that's invisible and he's desperate for a physical manifestation of that wound. To be seen. To be seen. Yeah. Is there something similar like that going on for my sister? I don't know. I wanted very much to place that in the novel in such a way that it would throw into question

the accuracy of all of our memories because I don't believe that I will ever know the truth. I could not decide whose narrative to trust. If I believe my father, I risk betraying my sister. If I believe my sister, I risk betraying my father. I was being asked to take a leap of faith. Our mother too was torn. She did as I did and examined her memories. Two coroners, we laid out the past and attempted an autopsy. But the past was not dead and refused to hold still. I didn't suddenly stumble upon something that said,

yes, this man is innocent or yes, this man is guilty. So in that sense, there is no resolution to that. But when a life is finished, it's a book you can read. It has a beginning, it has an end. And perhaps for me, I think I could maybe mourn my father in a different way after my sister had passed away. You have the whole book and then you look through it and perhaps as you look

through it you become more and more aware of the many different ways it can be interpreted. So in that sense it shifts our relationship and we see how much there was that we didn't understand. But I think that's true. I mean most relationships that I have that are the closer the person is in some sense, the more aware I am that there are layers that I'm never going to completely fathom. I love that idea of the life becoming a book after passing. It kind of perhaps reveals traumas or old wounds, you know, or questions that are raised anew in different ways. Well, we approach it in a different way. We start to maybe analyze it in a different way.

As with a book, you can go to page 50, see something that interests you and turn back to page 25 to see how that connected, which we can do when someone is still alive, but there's still new information entering. And we're in some senses censoring ourselves because what might be that person's reaction to how I'm now interpreting who you are and you you're busy interpreting me, and it's a give and take. And suddenly now, this is different. It's the other person's responses are, we have their past responses, but there are no new ones. My name is Chase Joint, and I'm the author of Vantage Points published by Arsenal Pulp Press.

I'm the co-author of two prior books and a non-fiction filmmaker that works at the edges of genre. For me, Death is both a closing and an opening. In the context of my family, it opened a portal to stories never previously explored and ways of interpreting that allowed those of us who are still living to collaborate on a different version of truth-seeking and family-making, ones that were less about facts and more about affects. In the context of my writing Vantage Points, I thought a lot about the protective mechanism

that death affords us. In the case of my now deceased grandfather, for example, I knew there was a safety in exploring questions of violence and intergenerational trauma differently than if he was still alive. Sure, there was definitely a risk of opening or pointing to issues and experiences that some in my family and otherwise might have desired

to leave untouched, but that limits the possibilities for a more collective pursuit of self-knowing and transformation. And for me, Vantage Points was never about telling one story, my story, or even my grandfather's story, but rather creating a kind of polyvocal, rhizomatic portrait of many people and many ways of being, all of which circle around and point to a similar set of questions. Guilt makes me the eye of her storm. It places me at the center of her story and attributes resolve to my actions, a resolve that is a lie. My guilt is not a lie. I cling to it. Guilt protects me from grief.

My own guilt was a distortion in the sense that it made me central. I mean, she wrote three reasons on her wall for taking her life. Losing the house was the third. Well, you could say the final is the most important. It's the finger on the trigger. Or the straw that broke the camel's back. The straw that broke the camel's back. But really in the end, it is her story. And my guilt is also a way, if I did something to cause this, then maybe if I could undo that, I could alter the outcome. And so long as you stay in that condition of wrestling with your own role in this, I think it's a protection against really feeling the excruciating pain she must

have been in to arrive at the decision to end her life. All this darkness. I know. But it's really a book about life. I don't want this to come across. It's so dark. So tell me, so you started, it's really a book about life? Yeah. It's a book about life. I mean, it is about death, but death is such a huge part of life. And grief is such a big part of life. As you said, it is actually a living act. Yeah. You know, I work every day in a public library where increasingly there are a great many people coming through our doors who are living in enormous precarity, who are clearly

in various conditions of suffering, and I'm sure of grieving many things. So in a sense, we're surrounded by grief all the time. A much earlier book of mine from 2009, a novel called The Incident Report, was made into a feature film by a young Canadian director called Naomi Jay. It has finally come out. Congratulations. The film is lovely and it's full of grief.

And Naomi said, I'm always told that my films are full of sorrow, but everybody in them chooses life. And that to me is kind of miraculous. They all find through their connection to beauty of one sort or another, through their connections to each other, through small moments of grace, if you want to call that, through a gesture someone makes that can heal you for even if it's only for a fragment of time that will carry you to the next spot where you can take the next step. All of that is quite beautiful.

I have learned that grief will walk with you, whether you want it to or not, that it is the final form of love. And then there will be days that you will wrestle with that angel. There are days where you will walk with the angel and be at peace, but those days can be fleeting and far. And that ultimately feels like one of the great, beautiful tasks of loving anyone, which is to continue the path, whatever it holds, however long it holds, and that your companion until you enter the

beyond is ultimately grief. That's a really beautiful and really brutal reality. Ever since her death, I've been writing, erasing, and rewriting this disobedient tale. You quote Thomas King at one point in your book who says, the truth about stories is that that's all we are. And at one point you write that you're conjuring your sister's voice. You say, we are all conjurers. So the dead are present only in our memories, but are these memories actually remembered or are they conjured? I think we're continuously rewriting the past. We're continuously conjuring it in a form that meets our needs.

And we all do that. We're all trying to make some kind of meaning out of our experience. We're looking for signposts. Should I go this way? Maybe there's something in my experience that will tell me which way to go. So when I reach in for that experience from the past, it's going to be shaped by what I'm asking of it in the present. So I think our memories are a continuous storytelling. And then there are all the stories that people are telling about us, how I perceive you sitting over there behind the sign that says ideas,

how you might perceive me, you know, then we are reshaping our own sense of ourself based on how others are responding to us. I see all of this as a form of narration, of storytelling. As a transnationally and transracially adopted person born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in white Southern Ontario, Canada, I think a lot about what it means to be family. I think about our genetic kin or our biological families because I'm in reunion with mine. I think about other kinds of family, not just adoptive, but also as a person of color, as a queer individual, what we might come to understand our chosen family. In all of these instances, not only is it impossible to understand who we might be in a stable, consistent, and never-changing way, but it's also not possible to understand who other people in our lives might be themselves. Family is no guarantee

in terms of connection. It also doesn't guarantee that we'll know people in a tangible, consistent way for the entirety of our connections. There is a conundrum, isn't there, about writing about your family and kind of wanting them to be understood by your readers when you're yourself struggling to understand them, your family members that is. I like to think that the fact that I'm trying to understand them is like an open window that through which people can enter. I never write something because I already understand it.

I'm always writing in an attempt to understand something. And the books that I love the most are where I feel that urgency, where I feel this is being written because the person writing it needs to write this. That doesn't mean that they're simply pouring it out unshaped. I hope there's an enormous amount of skill going into the creation of what I'm reading. But at the same time, underneath that, what's fueling that endeavor is a hunger to understand something better. And the person writing doesn't already have the answers. If they already have the answers, I'm less interested.

So I think the fact that I'm trying to understand these people is an invitation to anyone who reads it to try and understand either the people I'm depicting or the people who matter to them. It's simply an invitation to engage in an attempt to delve deeper and see what might be hiding under that layer or under that assumption. Or you know, when we were speaking of storytelling earlier these stories that we tell ourselves over and over again they become like little hamsters you know going around in a cage they're very familiar and if you remove that narration what other story might you find hiding behind it not a secret that that is necessarily nefarious, but just a different, or back to the sculpture,

walking around it, seeing it from a new, so the more I'm searching for an answer, maybe the more you as a reader will be invited to do the same. But after this process of telling their story, your mother and father and Christina, do you feel like there's more understanding of who they were and their

story? Or did they just become more mysterious? I think they become more mysterious and maybe I have a better understanding of myself. Just because I've now attempted to tell a story and I can look at what that story turned out to be on the page, how it was constructed and say, oh, what does that reflect about who I am that I chose to tell it in that way? And in a sense, yes, they become more mysterious. Is it family that becomes more mysterious or any human life that is examined so closely

and so intimately? Any human life. And because when you become aware of the degree to which your own take is only one and you're being very subjective and you're shaping and sculpting whatever it is that you're encountering in turning it into a story, you realize that this is just one version. I would love to know what would my mother, my father, or my sister have written if they were able to write their own version of There is No Blue, might terrify me.

But I'd be very interested to see what their story would be. Does death bring closure in the sense that it brings you a new kind of peace about your relationship with your mother, father, or your sister? No, I don't think so. No. I mean, the relationships remain as fraught and complex as they were to begin with, or as peaceful and easy as they were to begin with. None of them being completely peaceful and easy, but you know But my relationship with my sister was very intense and very complex. It remains, her death certainly didn't simplify anything. What about us reading this book?

What is it that you want the reader to know about your sister and your mother and father? That's a good question. I don't think I set out when I write something with an idea of what I want the reader to take away with. Just that someone is willing to take this strange thing I've put on paper and take it into their own being and make of it what you will is an enormous honor and something I want to keep doing because when I read, that's what I get to do. I get to take what someone wrote and turn it into. A book is completed in the reader and I don't set out to foresee what that completion is

going to be. Martha Bailey, thank you so much. Nala Ayad, thank you so much. Such an honor to be here. It's an honor to have you here. ["The Acclaimed Novel"] Martha Bailey's books include the acclaimed novel, The Incident Report and Sister Language,

co-authored with her late sister, Christina. Her latest book is There Is No Blue, the 2024 winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for non-fiction. Special thanks to Megan Leahy and the Writers' Trust of Canada. And to... My name is Emi Lin and I'm the author of the memoir Hereafter. My name is Jenny Hagen Mills and I'm the author of Everything and Nothing at All. My name is Chase Joint, and I'm the author of Vantage Points. This episode was produced by Chris Wadskow.

Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed.